I find this baffling.
Eyeballing the 512 GB TLC wafer price from China Flash Market web site, the Q4 2019 average price was $4.15 and the Q1 2020 average price is about $5.25. That means NAND spot prices are up about 30% in the past three months.
If I eyeball one of the DDR items on the China Flash Market website, it appear to be up about 10% in Feb 2020 compared to Nov 2019.
Today, Digitimes says Korean memory sales (mostly DRAM I suppose, but still a large chunk of NAND) are going down in Q1 2020 relative to Q4 2019. How can prices go up 30% (NAND) and up 10% (DRAM) AND total sales go down? Come on!
Interesting to see what MU has to say about the real environment next week.......
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Korean memory industry output value to slip in 1Q20, says Digitimes Research
Chiawen Chang, DIGITIMES Research, Taipei
digitimes.com
The output value of South Korea's memory chip industry is expected to drop by a slight 2.7% sequentially in the first quarter of 2020, according to Digitimes Research.
Concerns have emerged about the coronavirus impact on Samsung's and SK Hynix' memory chip shipments, prompting downstream module makers and channel distributors to step up their chip purchases.
Samsung and SK Hynix are both cautious about capacity expansion this year by focusing only on process technology transitions and manufacturing efficiency improvement.
In addition, the coronavirus impact on memory demand for smartphones remains to be seen. Global smartphone shipments are forecast to drop about 34% sequentially in the first quarter of 2020, due to the coronavirus outbreak that has hit related industry supply chains as well as the demand side, Digitimes Research estimates.
On the other hand, memory demand for server and SSD applications this year still looks promising. |
